Sophie Bassouls | Photograph | Themes

Désirs d'ici amours de Chine

Murs Murs

These walls tell sad stories. A glorious past, industrial, at times imperial, religious; they have been abandoned by men, workers, priests; they are set loose, attempting to disappear.
But how? Stone, concrete and brick abide. Bad weather works gently, takes its time to carry out its sabotage.

Couples d'artistes

"In the past, Sophie Bassouls has focused her lens primarily on faces within the solitude of rooms or settings that she considered significant. Taking pictures of a couple poses a more complicated dilemma than a solo portrait: it is not merely a question of doubling.
In the intimate face-to-face of a double portrait, we are placed in the confines of a scene where the gaze is transformed by the ontological complexity of a space become an imagined narrative of a relationship between the subjects depicted. The photographer invites us to enter a story whose impact largely constitutes the pictures artistic element of surprise."
Alin Avila

Paris-Istanbul

In 2005, a French photographer discovers Istanbul. Each year afterwards, she returns and takes photos of her walks around the city and the Bosporus straits. Enchanted by the city, she finds her imagination permeated with impressions she has gathered.
She interprets the city in her own way, with a kind of poetry that occupies a different register from simple photographs in which objects are seen and depicted literally. There is something dreamlike about them, certainly something hopeful, great tenderness, regret, and lots of respect for what has been and what is yet to come. She has created a series of interpretations of the city, its bustle, its openness to the physical world, its poverty and its grace, its current violence, its traces of refinement and Oriental culture

Deux à trois

Two men who go by the code names of ships lost at sea, Charlie Bravo and Echo Papa, two men intimately and steadfastly connected with my life, but also two men harassed and tested by life, for whom state-of-the-art medicine is the permanent bottom line, take a look at their various travels around the world at my side.

Nus et or

After many years taking pictures for the press and for publishing houses, I felt like doing something else: in particular, exploring the male body, a body that by nature remains mysterious to a woman. I also wanted to do work on the subject of thinness.

Religious bodies

To love them without believing in them. To visit churches as dormitories, refuges. To search among the layers of lace draped over altars, in alcoves, reposing in crystal reliquary, for those who rest in peace.
Some of them are actually made of flesh, shriveled, worn-down, mummified. Many children, in viewing them, have their first experience with death.

Plages noires

The eye has its reasons reason does not know. At a given moment, I started seeing in black. I was in Africa, black Africa, where anything can easily become black if it is not already, so I plunged the shore in shadow, made white sand black and caused night to fall well ahead of time on the young swimmers.

Sous les arbres, à l'ombre du boulevard

"Give me wine to bear their stupidity. Give me wine to know why, after being born, I must die. Give me wine, that you may call my suffering drunkenness, and my belief degeneracy; give me wine because there is not one among you who can pay my wages. Give me wine to drown my impotence. Give me that wine that silences pleasure, that cries against your deceit, then close the book that burns your hands while it destroys me." - Extract

Hommes Fleurs

Some friends and relatives of mine accepted to pose; each of them carrying a flower of their choice. The result is a series of large black and white prints over which I have repainted the flowers in colour.

Les Mannequins

Sophie Bassouls went from window to window  often at night  on fashionable streets in hip areas to photograph wax mannequins. The idea itself is beautiful. But what makes these photographs admirable, what makes me desire to write about them, is the ease with which Sophie Bassouls crosses these glass façades, capturing and rendering their vivid, intense, nearly ardent gazes;

Les Michel Tournier

A name to protect
As soon as a man or woman leaves the private sphere and enters into public view  whether in show business or literature  the question of whether to use a pseudonym must be addressed. To choose a pseudonym means perhaps wanting to protect your private life or attempting to make a break with your family background. And it certainly means choosing a personal label more conspicuous than the one your family gave you.

Paris est une ville pleine de lions

Paris is a city full of lions, and out of all its boroughs I live in the most leonine: the part of the 7th arrondissement that borders the Seine, the Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde. Petrified but vigilant, languid in their pools, spewing water in fountains, they hold up balconies and guard bridges and doors.

Méli-Mélo

A space where photos are stored over time, pictures that please for no reason, not necessarily related to one another: a base for developing projects, a preliminary stage of research. Kitchen, laboratory? A storage space, in short, but not a trash can.